Bell & Ross – New Instagram account

Bell & Ross has always emphasized the importance of image and design. Therefore, it was natural that Bruno Belamich, Creative Director, had the idea to create a new Instagram account, @bellross_chronology, which will serve as an official “online” catalog and completes @bellrosswatches, the official one launched in 2012 which highlights daily reports, photoshoots and live videos relating to the news of the brand. The chronological presentation of the models is updated at the time of each launch.

The two accounts compliment one another and as Bruno Belamich notes “the idea with this new account is to be able to share the vision of Bell & Ross and its collections from a chronological point of view”.

This new platform gets straight to the point, by gathering official images of the brand from its origins, starting with the birth of the Bell & Ross logo, that remains unchanged since its creation. “Much of our philosophy is based on this symbol, which represents the union of competencies, the key to our success: design, mastery of watchmaking, engineering and recognition of professional actors.”

The iconography immerses us into the world of Bell & Ross and the three areas dear to the brand: air, land and sea, which highlight its perpetual quest for extremes. The visuals set the tone and express various emotions, according to each area and model presented, going from the history of aviation to scuba diving.

To inaugurate Bell & Ross Chronology, the reference Instagram account for the collections and the history of the brand, the manufactory decided to unveil the visuals of its Bellytanker models and the concept car designed by Bruno Belamich.

Sapphire crystal is less or more scratch-proof, but its hardness has made it particularly hard to utilize in anything aside from very simple contours. Technology and techniques have improved in the last several decades, however, with much more fully sapphire-cased watches, and even prices for them starting to come down like with the Hublot Big Bang UNICO Sapphire (hands-on) – though they tend to remain more infrequent and costly even than precious metal instance watches.One thing that’s particularly neat about the X1 series watches, though, is that no matter how outlandish each layout gets, it still conveys Bell & Ross’ core design language; which square 45mm instance, screwed together at each of the four corners. And though this DNA does carry through to the Bell & Ross BR-X1 Skeleton Tourbillon Sapphire, were it not for its instance signatures, this one may be confused for something aside from a Bell & Ross watch, as the primary timekeeping cues (the hour and second hands) were shrunken into the upper 12:00 region of the dial. While this will give lots of opportunity to enjoy the flying tourbillon’s movement against most of the clear, negative space from the sapphire, it does detract somewhat from overall utility and legibility as compared with all the new pilot and tool watches — something which other Experimental offerings have claimed.